When the Palladium was stolen and the oracles were met, Odysseus persuaded the host to build a great hollow horse — Epeius the carpenter shaped it with Athena's help, the doughtiest warriors hid inside, the fleet feigned departure to Tenedos, and Sinon with a lying tale persuaded the Trojans to drag the engine within the walls, though Cassandra and Laocoon warned in vain until Apollo's serpents silenced the priest and the city feasted around the gift.1
Epeius and Athena
The nested Little Iliad had brought Philoctetes from Lemnos, slain Paris, stolen the heaven-fallen image, and fetched Neoptolemus from Scyros — yet Troy's towers still stood. Odysseus conceived the last stratagem: a horse of timber, not a temple offering but an engine of war. Epeius son of Panopeus — the boxer who had felled Euryalus at Patroclus' games, the craftsman Pausanias traced to Phocus' line — built the hollow frame with Athena's help. In the hall of Alcinous, Homer has Demodocus sing how Epeius made it and Odysseus filled it with the men who would sack Ilios; Ovid tells the same tale in Roman verse, the goddess guiding the carpenter's hand while the Ithacan planned the guile.2
The champions within
They followed the counsel of Odysseus and shut the doughtiest of the host inside the belly of the horse, with the Ithacan himself as their captain. On the flank they engraved an inscription that read as a votive gift: for their return home, the Greeks dedicate this thank-offering to Athena — a pious lie to cloak the ambush. Homer remembers Neoptolemus among the leaders who never paled at the descent into the wooden womb, gripping his sword-hilt and eager for the Trojans; Menelaus later told Telemachus how Helen, going round the horse in the night, called each chief by imitating the voice of his wife, and how Anticlus would have answered had not Odysseus clamped his mouth shut and saved the whole enterprise.3
Departure to Tenedos
The stratagem required the enemy to believe the war was over. The Achaeans burned their tents on the shore, put to sea by night, and lay at anchor off Tenedos — the island whence the fleet had first made land in the mistaken Mysian voyage, and whither many a captain would scatter again after Troy fell. They left Sinon behind with orders to light a beacon on the grave of Achilles when the horse was within the walls and the Trojans slept. Apollodorus sets the scene plainly: one man with a tale, the host vanished over the horizon, the city left staring at an enormous horse on the plain.4
Sinon's tale
Sinon — a name the Epic Cycle remembers only for this lie — persuaded the Trojans that the horse was a peace-offering to Athena, built because the goddess had withdrawn her favour after the Palladium was stolen from her shrine. He wove a story of his own supposed escape from Greek vengeance, a victim left to die on the shore, and he urged them to drag the gift into the citadel lest the goddess turn her wrath on Troy itself. Hyginus compresses the outcome: the horse was hauled within, and when the Trojans slept, overcome by sport and wine, the Achaeans opened it, killed the gate-guards, and admitted their friends. The nested episode on the Sack of Troy tells the night that followed; here the war ends not with a battle but with a story believed.5
Cassandra and Laocoon
Not all the Trojans were deceived. Cassandra cried that an armed force was hidden in the horse; Laocoon the seer — Hyginus names him a priest of Apollo, son of Acoetes and brother of Anchises, punished by the god for marrying against his will — confirmed her with his own augury. Some urged burning the engine, others casting it from the cliffs; but most voted to spare it as a sacred votive, and the city turned to sacrifice and feasting. Then Apollo sent a sign: two serpents swam from the neighbouring islands and devoured Laocoon's sons at the altar. The Trojans read the omen as proof that the priest had lied and the horse must be brought inside — the very proof that doomed them. The nested episode on the Sack tells Priam's death; here the last truthful voices are drowned by a god's theatre.6
Dragged within the walls
The Trojans breached their own ramparts to admit the horse — timbers too vast for the gate, hauled with ropes and rollers into the citadel while women and children sang hymns to the supposed gift. Priam's house still stood, Helen moved among the feasters, and Cassandra's prophecies went unheeded as they had through ten years of war. The Little Iliad ends where this episode ends: the engine planted in the heart of Ilion, the fleet hidden at Tenedos, Sinon waiting with his beacon, and the doughtiest Greeks breathing in the dark. When night fell and wine overcame the guards, the nested Sack of Troy begins — the horse opened, the warriors descending, and the city given to fire.7
· EXEUNT ·
How the centuries saw it
On screen
Troy
Wolfgang Petersen
Petersen's epic made the hollow horse and the night of fire the defining Trojan image for a generation.
Helen of Troy
Robert Wise
Wise's peplum keeps Sinon, Laocoön, and the horse entering the gates — mid-century Hollywood's sack prelude.
In play
Trojan Horse
The gift that opens a city remains the archetype of infiltration — and the proverb for malware that arrives as software.
Aeneid
Virgil
Book II — Sinon's speech, Laocoön's warning, and Aeneas watching the horse bring Troy's end from within.
Little Iliad
The cyclic poem of the horse's building — Epeius, Odysseus' counsel, and the warriors hidden in the belly.